popularity helper

comments

Since 2013, i tried a lot of approaches in tiny intros for MSDOS, with the exception of : 3D raycasting. As a computer scientist with specialisation "computer graphics" i simply was not interested enough in manually asm-coding a brute force raycaster, with regard to already existing, excellent examples like "Spongy" (128b, TBC, 2009) and "Wolf128" (128b, Baudsurfer, 2014). However, i coded several "2,5D" effects like "Lucy" (64b, 2014) and recently "Projektbeschreibung" (32b, DESIRE, 2018). So naturally, at some point i asked myself, what is the smallest 3D raycaster which is perceived as one, being centered, having decent textures and colors, and runs on all common systems (MSDOS, FreeDos, WinXP Dos, Dosbox) while being totally smooth at least on real hardware? The (my) answer is :

49 bytes

That "pure" version is included in the archive - as well as a *42* bytes version which lacks all the criteria above. Going lower in size means that you abandon the "3D" and "raycasting" at some point, leading to something like "Floorcast" (32b, DESiRE, 2018) ... Anyway! So what to do with the "rest" of space to reach the next 2^x category - 64b?

A) "INTO A NEW ERA"

The 64b intro shown at function 2018, it has 64 gray custom colors and softclipping, trying to somewhat imitate the look of "Spongy". I had a hard time to decide between this and a dithered 85(!) shades version that flickers a bit, but shows a full tunnel (no clip)

B) "INTERACTIVE / "Wolf64"

Mouse controlled, escapable version for both real systems (FreeDos, MSDOS, WinXP Dos) and DosBox, 64b and 63b, in the spirit of "Wolf128", just in half the size ;) Don't forget to load a mouse driver on real systems! Note : these haven't been fully optimized

C) "COLORS!"

Custom Color Palettes in Blueish, Purplelish, Greenish, Yellowish, Redish, inverted, whatever, you name it. All of them are 64b or smaller. Some of them look REALLY good, but may flicker noticeably or maybe too dark which is why the released intro itself comes with safe anticodercolors ;)

Woooa!! Stunning as hell little thing. I loved it under dosbox and see what really happen in slow mode and between ;) that wolf <3 it could have been #1, I think it ended that taste made a difference between the awesome prods, a 256b looks better..

As described here you can now run x86 asm directly in a browser (dosbox) which would result in this 64 byte raycaster actually being tweetable (link with code in less than 140 chars) if only the link would world properly :D